Environments are used to describe a general deployment target like production, staging, or development. When a GitHub Actions workflow deploys to an environment, the environment is displayed on the main page of the repository. You can use environments to require approval for a job to proceed, restrict which branches can trigger a workflow, gate deployments with custom deployment protection rules, or limit access to secrets. For more information about creating environments, see Managing environments for deployment.

Each job in a workflow can reference a single environment. Any protection rules configured for the environment must pass before a job referencing the environment is sent to a runner. The job can access the environment's secrets only after the job is sent to a runner.

When a workflow references an environment, the environment will appear in the repository's deployments. For more information about viewing current and previous deployments, see Viewing deployment history.